


Five Proverbs Of Hell

by aprilwitching



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, M/M, but i promise if you like other things i've written you will probably like this too, even though magic doesn't happen, i mean sort of. it's about more than one thing, technically this could be considered an attempt at "literary writing" or "realistic fiction", this is a story about mental illness that never uses the phrase "mental illness", writing from prompts again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-06-30
Packaged: 2018-07-19 06:40:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7349950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aprilwitching/pseuds/aprilwitching
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a story about two people who met once, and how one of them died.</p>
<p> I owe credit to William Blake and the writing prompts on nosebleedclub.tumblr.com for inspiration.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Proverbs Of Hell

 

 

**DIP HIM IN THE OCEAN WHO LOVES WATER:**

 

The boy presses his fingers against the glass panel at the bottom of the boat and peers down into a world of dim green and writhing things. He enjoys the aquarium in the city, but this really isn’t like that at all. The aquarium has clear, contained waters, waters he can easily see through, waters he knows the beginning and ending of. The aquarium waters are cleaned by special pumps. They contain no animals that people didn’t put there.

This is the sea, and it is not about people. _It was here before people and it will_ , he thinks, _probably be here_ after _people, and never notice our leaving_. He listens to the small, dark waves thunk against the sides of the boat. Sometimes they remind him of a heartbeat. Sometimes they remind him of a hundred hungry tongues, licking, lapping, wanting a way inside.

He shudders, and presses his face right up to the glass. It’s cool against his cheek. He’s mostly kneeling on it now; the teacher told the children not to do that, but she’s occupied with the rest of the class, trying to keep them in line, listening to their guide tell the field trip group Facts About Marine Life. The boy doesn’t know how to swim. His mother doesn’t like him going in deep water because he has a medical condition. She is worried that one day he would have one of his fits while swimming, or trying to swim, and then he would sink and drown. _Better not to chance it_ , she says.

_What if I fell through?_ the boy thinks. _What if the whole glass window shattered and broke, and I sank into the sea right now?_ He imagines bubbles surging from his mouth, the deep green water swallowing the sight of him away from the others, up on the little ship. (Above him and to the starboard side, the tour guide apologizes for its relative opacity today. _There may be a storm coming in_ , he says.)

The boy watches tiny white jellyfish squirm by like baby ghosts, close enough that he could touch them if it weren’t for the glass. He sees a silver flash of something slightly further down-- the spine of a fish, perhaps? He looks past that, and sees more: those writhing shadows again. A multitude of shapes twisting together, forming branches and fingers and fins and ropes, maybe, vaguely, briefly; then sinking back into a greater blackness.

If he concentrates, he can hear a susurrus coming from the water, almost like a whisper. It is not a sweet whisper. It is not a sinister whisper. It is not an urgent whisper. It is just a _whisper_ , but he’s a curious boy, and he strains to make it out. Is it the sound of the creatures down below? Is it the sea itself? What does the water have to tell him? He concentrates. His breath mists the glass, very slightly. He _concentrates_.

The teacher turns as soon as he starts to cry and yell. She hurries to his side and pulls him away from the glass at the bottom of the boat, back on the solid wood that hides the ocean beneath their feet. His face is red. His eyes are wide and his pupils frighteningly dilated. His breath hitches and tears stream down his cheeks, so that his skin is wet with salt water despite never having touched the sea.

_I fell_ , he keeps saying, as the teacher tries to calm him down and apologize to the tour guide at the same time. _I got too close, and I_ fell _. I fell into the ocean. I_ saw _. I saw_ everything _. There’s so much. There’s_ so _much. There’s so_ much _. I’m_ scared _. I’m sorry. I’m scared._

He’s all right, calm and lucid again, by the time they get back on land, but he’s never quite the same after that day. His teacher notices, but she keeps it to herself. His mother notices, and she worries about him even more. _He_ notices, most of all, and he tries not to think too much about it. He tries not to think too much, or see too far. But he’s taught himself how to do that now, and it proves an impossible habit to break.

 

 

**SHE WHOSE FACE GIVES NO LIGHT SHALL NEVER BECOME A STAR:**

 

The girl prefers dreaming.

If she cannot be dreaming, she at least prefers to be asleep, or something like asleep. She is like an artist of dreaming and sleep, she sometimes thinks. She knows that, just as it’s possible to daydream while conscious, it’s possible to go into a state that is similar to sleep while still moving through everyday life and appearing to be more or less awake. She can do it easily. There are tricks that help, like not eating very much and topping off your water bottle with some of your parents’ vodka before you go to school. But they aren’t necessarily necessary-- this girl is so talented that, if she wants to, she can send the part of her mind that feels things, that understands the sound and fury of the waking world in ways that frighten or hurt, far away into anodyne oblivion with just a _thought_. Just her _will_. She peels that better part of herself away and the rest of her proceeds with her life like a changeling made of mud.

Whenever she comes back to true wakefulness, briefly, with a headache or pink, puffy skin around wet eyes, or bruises scattered across her body, she fails to recall the source of these things. She doesn’t care that she can’t recall their source. It doesn’t matter. She has been successful. She’s very good at sleeping.

But _dreaming_ is something else! The girl _lives_ in dreams.

Her dreams are full of dragons and ships and bright knives she can use to defend the magic, secret places in her brain. Her dreams contain talking birds and huge night skies filled with visible stars, like no sky she’s ever seen with waking eyes. There are distant planets in her dreams, and tall, gentle aliens who understand her perfectly, who speak fluid, eloquent words that make more sense than anything else, who kindly take her into their kingdom. There are people who care about her, and no one is broken, or permanently cruel, or permanently sad.

_It’s more than escapism_ , she thinks. _It’s better than reality. It’s reality as it_ ought _to be._

When she’s awake, she doesn’t see much that’s worth living for. The future is a gray, predictable march through grinding obligation after grinding obligation, all the way down to death. People are small-minded and angry, with small, petty angers that eat at their insides a little more every day. They snap and snarl at each other. They ignore each other. They hit people they don’t understand. _They get twisted up and then they die_ , she thinks, _and_ none _of them really deserve it, maybe-- they were all kids once-- and I can’t bear to watch it happen, in any case. I can’t bear for that to be all there is. Maybe it makes me a coward, but I don’t want to have to look at it. I don’t want it to touch me._

The reality the girl knows has low, smoggy skies, and heavy chemical winds that make her drop to the sidewalk coughing and wheezing on bad days. It has no talking birds, no aliens. It has far less caring and eloquence than she wishes it had.

The girl knows that other people look through her most of the time. She knows they think she’s unintelligent, boring. Odd, quiet, not-all-there. Well, she’s _not_ all there, and why should she be?

 

 

**ONE THOUGHT FILLS IMMENSITY:**

 

The man has spent most of his life feeling like a prophet of doom. Sometimes he wants to apologize to everyone he has ever met. _I can’t help it_ , he imagines saying, “it” indicating the tired smudges below his eyes, the trace of a line between his eyebrows that will become a deep and permanent trench-- you can tell-- if given ten or twenty more years to grow into itself. “It” meaning his morbid sense of humor, the surly cynicism that occasionally exasperates his friends, that made his mother chide him for being a “Donnie Downer” when he was growing up, that eventually made her send him to counselors and psychologists throughout his teen years. _I’m not deranged_ , he always wanted to plead to the psychologists. _I’m not going to shoot up a school. I’d never do anything violent. I just see too much of the world as it really is, and I don’t think I can ever stop looking at it, and sometimes I’m not even sure I_ should _stop looking at it, not even sure I_ want _to._

“It” meaning the terror that suffuses his heart. There is dread packed tight into each corner of creation. Everything has a mass of writhing darkness just behind it, or lurking within it. Everything is dangerous and unknowable and shadowed by the promise of death, and what’s he supposed to do, just pretend it isn’t there? Pretend he can’t read the subtext, can’t see the tangled ropes and fingery nets that connect one piece of the darkness to another, that bind together all the world?

Sometimes the terror gets to be too much for him, too big, and he finds it difficult to function at all. Food congeals in his mouth. When he tries to leave his apartment, his breath goes watery and thick in his lungs, and his legs lock at the threshold, refusing to move him forward.

Mostly, though, he does okay. He works part time, writes horror fiction on the side. He’s even sold a story to an online magazine, and he’s gotten particularly encouraging, sympathetic rejection e-mails regarding three others. He takes some classes at a community college.

He likes tabletop games, bad documentaries on the History Channel, bowling. Going to the aquarium up in the city to watch the fish and cephalopods make their circumscribed circuits in pristine tanks of water that is really not like the water of the ocean at all.

Still, through all these things, the dread lingers with him. It’s a low, constant murmur, always waiting to shriek louder into a wail, an awful and overwhelming song, a black wave to pull him under.

 

There are only three occasions, ever, after the age of eight or nine, during which he is briefly, truly free from dread.

The first happens when he’s still a teenager. At the badgering insistence of his friends-- well, the people he hangs out with after school--, he drops acid behind an abandoned building that used to be a supermarket. It’s the edge of winter, and the sun is setting early when the acid hits him. He sees the emptied concrete box of the ex-supermarket suffused with red and gold light, a vessel now for something holier than ham and bruised apples and boxes of condoms or cereal, and then the light gathers more brightly at the edges of his vision, swirling itself into fiery kaleidoscope patterns. He is small inside the fire, but he doesn’t mind. There’s nothing in him now but sheer and joyous wonder, even as sparks begin to rain down on his face, stinging slightly as they sink through his flesh. (It’s snowing, some part of him realizes, the first snow of the year.)He’s enraptured by the light and the flame and the glory of it all for seventeen seconds, seventeen seconds that feel like more than an hour, and then he turns around to try and tell his friends about it, and something _changes_ the moment he looks into their glassy, uncomprehending eyes, something _wrenches_ itself sickeningly in his stomach, and the terror is upon him, and it’s a hundred times worse than it has ever been before.

It is the worst agony he’s ever felt. When, finally, it subsides, he vows never to take drugs again, not even pot, not even psychiatric medication if he can avoid it-- he doesn’t even want to risk drinking. And it’s a promise he keeps. He’s never even tempted.

On the second occasion, he falls in love.

It’s a few years later, and he’s pretty well into his twenties, but he’s never been in love before. It doesn’t bother him too much that he hasn’t. It’s perfectly fine, in fact. If he thinks about love too hard, especially romantic love-- even as just an abstract concept-- acute, predictable spears of anxiety pierce him through. The watery, paralyzed feeling comes over him, and he feels like he’s about to break through a sheet of glass and sink down, and down, and down into cold shadows forever.

He’s not a misanthrope, or a recluse. He always has a few friends, or at least amicable acquaintances whom he likes. He’s even fooled around with a few girls at reluctantly-attended parties, in coat rooms or on back porches at night. But neither of those brands of affection are really love; he avoids love as best he can. Whenever he starts to suspect he’s getting too attached to some girl he knows, he cuts her off completely. He realizes it must make him seem like an asshole, and he feels bad about it, but he can’t help himself. The dread has him fast in its grip.

Who can say what is different about _this_ time?

Is it that it happens in the aquarium? He doesn’t particularly associate love with aquariums. Sometimes the ceaseless movement of the sharks depresses him, or unsettles him so much he needs to leave, but an aquarium is not a romantic danger zone.

Is it that it happens with another man? He has never had any problem with gay people or bisexuals, but it has never really occurred to him that he might be one himself. He isn’t quite as on guard against love around other men.

So, sure, he’s _nervous_ when the slouchy, fair-haired guy sits down next to him on the wooden bench across from the tank full of nurse sharks-- sits down a foot away from him even though there is plentiful bench space and the room is quite large and uncrowded. He’s taken aback when, without preamble, the slouchy guy begins regurgitating information about the sharks and their habits, enthusiastically moving his hands around, grinning crookedly and casting sidelong glances at his newfound audience to make sure he’s still interested. He’s taken aback, and he’s nervous, but he isn’t as nervous as he _might_ be, and the nervousness fades slowly from him as the shark guy talks and talks. It really is an interesting monologue. He finds himself charmed by it. Shark Guy’s hands move through the air like fins through the water. Shark Guy has large, pale eyes behind large, thick glasses, and the light glinting off their lenses resembles the sunlight glinting off the surface of the sea right after the sun rises, or right before it sets.

Without thinking about it, he moves slightly closer to Shark Guy on the bench. He opens his mouth to interrupt him with a joke, which Shark Guy actually laughs at, and then, just like that, they are having a conversation. They are standing up together. They are still talking as they leave the aquarium.

They spend the whole afternoon with each other. At some point, they find themselves holding hands, sitting in Shark Guy’s parked car, watching the poisoned clouds above the city turn lurid tie-dye colors as the day dwindles into twilight. The man begins to realize what’s happening, and he feels no fear at all. Only excitement and satisfaction. He squeezes Shark Guy’s long, bony fingers where they lie laced between his own, less graceful fingers. He feels his heart quicken when Shark Guy smiles at his touch, but the quickening is not at all unpleasant. It’s a sharp shock of effervescence.

Shark Guy leans over towards him, and then their mouths are upon each other, and Shark Guy tastes of coffee and of something metallic but sweet. Shark Guy is surprisingly aggressive with his tongue, but the man finds he enjoys it. He pulls Shark Guy roughly to him and bites his lower lip in encouragement.

After some time, they break from kissing for long enough that he can give Shark Guy directions to his apartment. They both grin the whole trip there; they joke and laugh in a giddy, anticipatory way. Shark Guy drives over the speed limit, but there aren’t a whole lot of other cars on the road by now, and it doesn’t worry the man the way it otherwise might.

They spend the night together, and even the awkward moments are pretty wonderful.

But the man wakes up late the following morning to an empty futon and empty rooms. Shark Guy is gone, and his car is gone from the apartment complex parking lot. There is no note, although Shark Guy has been considerate enough to empty the dishwasher and change the toilet paper roll before taking his leave. The man realizes that he never asked for Shark Guy’s phone number, or gave Shark Guy his own number; never learned Shark Guy’s real name, or offered his own name. He has no way of contacting Shark Guy; no way of tracking him down.

The dread returns slowly, seeping back into him over the course of many subsequent days. For the most part, he is only rueful. _Stupid_ , he thinks. _How stupid I was. To think that was_ love _. To think it would end any other way._

The man never sees or hears from Shark Guy again. As the days become weeks, and then months, he goes back to all his old habits and obsessive ouroboroses of thought, his heart, if anything, more frightened and guarded than it was before. It is not the sharp horror of the acid trip that he feels now, but a bleak, despairing resignation. He is afraid, and he is alone, and that is simply what his nature must be. _I’m sorry; I can’t help it._

 

And the third and final occasion on which the dread lifts from him comes upon the day that he dies.

 

 

**EXCESS OF SORROW LAUGHS; EXCESS OF JOY WEEPS:**

 

The woman opens her eyes, but it wouldn’t be quite right to say that she wakes up. She has not been fully awake for a very long time.

Still, she rises from the mattress at her cheap alarm clock’s tinny chirruping. She makes herself instant coffee. She splashes a generous portion of rum in the coffee. She downs the whole mug of it in two large gulps. She brushes her teeth thoroughly; gargles twice with strong mouthwash; changes into her work uniform. She bikes for fifteen minutes through the gloaming, over cracked and quiet sidewalks, to reach the convenience store where she works night shifts at the register.

This is her routine. She prefers having routines; she can move through them without thinking more easily, without really engaging in her own life, without truly waking. She has had long practice in the art of not-waking. Adulthood has honed her into a perfect sleeper, perfect dreamer, perfect drone. She does her job; she does the bare minimum she must to get by; she’s quiet and obedient and a little stupid-seeming, and on the inside, unknown to anyone else, she runs freely through worlds she prefers to the so-called real one.

In the woman’s mind, all the bike ride over to work, she is on horseback, racing through cooling desert air on a human-colonized planet far out in space. The flashes of porchlights, and then streetlights and neon signs, become distant, glowing alien wildlife, or distant fires on the vast plain. The long-abandoned ruins of an ancient alien citadel rise around her. She is going to the little outpost town just past the ruins to deliver an important message. Or, no, she is going to the spaceport where she works as a clerk; it’s a lowly job, but it allows her to converse with travelers from all sorts of places; bigger planets, far-off stars, even old Earth itself. Or, no...

She reaches the convenience store. She dismounts; locks her bike on the bike rack outside; goes in to exchange a handful of meaningless, rote words with her manager before her manager goes into the back room office to do whatever it is she does for most of the night while she, the dreaming woman, gets into position behind the register.

There are a few customers for the first two hours or so, but then they stop meandering into the shop. The woman retrieves the fat paperback book she’s currently reading from the spot beneath the counter where she’s covertly stashed it. She knows her manager knows she reads on the job, but since she isn’t obvious about it and it’s never interfered with her work performance, it hasn’t become an issue. Her manager simply doesn’t care that much.

A book is just another kind of dream, of course. She quickly falls, fast and grateful, from the shallows of her own dreams into the depths of this one. She reads on and on, through fields of stars, through fires and floods and dramatic personal revelations, until the door makes its chiming sound and she’s forced to look up from the page.

A young man walks into the store. He’s slight, unassuming, her own age or a bit older, maybe mid-twenties or so. His clothes are clean and careful-looking; his entire person is clean and careful looking. She isn’t interested in watching him; doubts he’s anything to worry about, really, but his jittery, hyper-alert manner and the way he begins to make slow, apparently aimless circuits of the tiny store’s handful of aisles trip her shoplifter-detection senses a little. She puts her book aside for the moment and keeps half an eye on the man as he examines small bottles of dish detergent and packages of instant ramen as though they were precious artifacts, or dangerous explosives.

The door chimes _again_ , to her surprise and annoyance, and another young man walks into the store. Actually, this one _runs_. He’s at the counter before she has time to realize what’s going on.

“ALL RIGHT, MOTHERSTICKER,” yells the second man, “THIS IS A FUCK-UP!”

The woman realizes what’s going on. But the second man’s exact words hit her a moment before any inkling of the situation’s gravity and, without wanting it, she feels her face starting to twist up in a grin. A giggle slips out of her mouth.

“Do you think there’s something _funny_ going on?!” demands the second man. “I have a fucking _gun_ , okay?!”

He does, she notice, have a gun. It looks black and real and deadly, and disconcertingly close to her. His hands are shaking around it. _What’s happening now?_ she wonders. _I understand I’m being robbed, but what’s_ happening _now?_

Time seems slower than usual. She is aware of so many more things. She doesn’t feel awake, but she is no longer dreaming; some part of her is here, for once, and only here. When was the last time she saw the world like this? _Is_ this the world?

She sees the shaking hands on the gun, and she sees the man’s face, and she sees that he’s not really a man at all. She’d bet money that he’s younger than eighteen, if she were the sort of person who made bets. He’s got scared, crazed eyes. He’s not wearing a real mask, but there’s something smeared thickly over his face, something like green mud or paint or-- could it be?-- the drugstore face masks she remembers her mother used to put on every night before she went to bed. She thinks she smells something like mint julep wafting off the boy.Yes, she’s sure that’s it, now. This terrified little robber is wearing a middle-aged lady’s cheap pore-cleansing mint mask in a bizarre attempt to disguise himself. She can’t help it-- her giggle bubbles up inside her again. It grows and grows. It bursts from her throat as a fully-formed laugh.

“ _Shut up_!” yells the boy. “Shut _up_ , bitch!”

She can’t shut up. She sees anger rising in him, mingling with the fear, and she sees his hands on the gun, and she would guess he’s never fired it at a human being before in his life, but she suspects she’s about to be the first for that honor. Still, she feels a strange tenderness, something edging on despair. She remembers being that young. She remembers being terrified, before a beaten dreaminess took its place behind her eyes. When he opens his mouth to shout at her, she can see that one of his front teeth is chipped. His voice breaks a little on the word “bitch”.

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ! **_God_**! Shut up!”

The woman laughs helplessly. There was a protective shield around her heart, or her mind, and she feels it crack like a layer of ice struck with a crowbar. She’s waking up. There are tears in the corners of her eyes, and her mouth hurts. She plants both hands on the edge of the counter to brace herself. _I’m not laughing at you_ , she wants to tell the boy. _It isn’t that. I promise._ But her mouth won’t cooperate to form the words.

Out of the corner of her eye she sees the man who came into the store first, the clean and careful one, approach them. Quickly, quietly. He doesn’t move like he’s afraid, or upset, or about to do anything heroic. He moves forward with the determined frown of a man trying to catch his bus as it pulls out of the station. Still, she sees what he’s about to do just before he does it, and she has time to think, barely, _That’s really brave of him, oh my god--_

And he lunges for the boy and his gun, but the boy spins around at him before he makes it, and the boy shoots him, and the man falls heavily on the slick tile floor.

The woman thinks she is maybe screaming, now. She’s not certain. Her ears are filled with ringing, deaf in the aftermath of the gunshot.

The boy’s eyes and mouth go wide in shock or anguish. He says a few words she cannot hear, and she notices he has begun to cry as he turns, gun still in hand, to sprint out of the store.

The woman scrambles over the counter to go to the man on the floor. The first thing she notices is that he isn’t dead. The shot seems to have hit him somewhere around the shoulder area, or maybe some non-fatal part of his chest-- she can’t really tell, because there’s a fair amount of blood. It’s soaking his shirt, so dark in places it looks black. There’s a little blood around his head, too, and she realizes he must have hit it, hit it hard, when he fell. Maybe he has a concussion. When she kneels down beside him, she sees that one of his pupils is enormously dilated, while the other is contracted small. His mouth moves like the mouth of a fish on a hook. The blood glistens under the florescent lights; she can’t stop seeing it. Can’t stop looking. This poor man. Is he dying? She has no idea. She doesn’t know anything about medicine, or human bodies. Not really. Not anything useful.

The man seems like he’s trying to turn towards her. He must be conscious, then. _Isn’t that a thing with head injuries?_ she thinks. _Aren’t you supposed to make sure the person stays conscious?_ She puts two fingers on his pale cheek. It’s a lot colder than she thinks it should be.

“It’s all right,” she finds herself saying. Probably much too loudly; the ringing’s still in her ears. “Can you hear me? You did a brave thing. I’m sorry. Can you stay awake? I’m...I’m going to call the ambulance.” Clumsily, she reaches in the back pocket of her pants and pulls out her battered old flip phone. She snaps it open and dials 911 with shaking fingers.

The man moves his hand stiffly, the hand on the side where he wasn’t shot. It almost looks as though he’s pointing at something. The ceiling? The magazine rack? The glowing EXIT sign? His mouth moves more purposefully now, like he’s trying to form words. There are, she notices, tears beading in the corners of his eyes. One rolls slowly down his cheekbone and into the cup of his ear. Blood is oozing from his nose, now, too, she sees.

Part of the woman wants to retreat from the sight, from this stranger lying on the dingy tile floor of the crappy little convenience store in such obvious pain. Part of her wants to turn away, roll itself back into a protective cocoon of waking sleep again. But she finds that most of her doesn’t want that at all. Or perhaps it’s that most of her refuses to allow that anymore. _He deserves to have someone here_ , she thinks. _Someone should be here. Someone should watch over him. Someone should..._

“Hello,” says a calm female voice through the phone. “911. What is your emergency?”

She tells the 911 operator, as best and as briefly as she can, and then she turns back to the man on the floor. He gazes at her, or maybe into her, or maybe only through her. His mouth moves again.

“What?” she asks him. “Please tell me, if you can. What is it?” The man grimaces. She tries not to wince back at him. The man contorts his face further.

“ ** _Look_** ,” he says, with apparent effort but shocking clarity.

She’s not sure what he means, but she nods at him. She even tries to smile, a little. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I’m looking. I promise. I’m looking.”

There are sirens in the distance, screaming rapidly nearer. At first she thinks it’s the ambulance, come much, much faster than expected. Then she sees the flashing lights as the cop cars pull into the parking lot, and she realizes that her manager must have called the police from the back, at some point.

Everything is shining with terror and a kind of sick beauty. _I’m alive_ , thinks the woman, staring at the night outside the door. _I’m alive_ , she thinks, staring at the colorful packages of cigarettes lined up on a shelf behind her counter, glittery in their cellophane wrappers. _I’m alive_ , she thinks, looking into the face of the man on the floor, _and it’s probably because of you_.

The world, _this_ world, is painfully real around her, but she is a part of it now.

The man on the floor is as white as a corpse. His breathing is hitched and shallow, barely happening at all, and his eyes are completely glazed over. She doesn’t think that he can hear her anymore. She doubts he knows she’s there. She doubts he knows _he’s_ there. He appears well beyond all that. Still, she doesn’t avert her eyes, and she nods her head to him, just as though it mattered. “I’m looking,” she tells the man again. Her voice is thick and wobbly. “I’m looking.”

 

 

**ETERNITY IS IN LOVE WITH THE PRODUCTIONS OF TIME:**

 

All dread leaves him when the bullet enters his flesh. Maybe it’s because of the pain. The man is used to intense emotional discomfort, but he has rarely been in much physical pain before-- a stomach flu here, a sprained ankle there. That’s all. This pain is a new country. It explodes him, it seems like. It fills his mind in an instant. It becomes everything there is.

He falls. Even the sharp impact when his skull meets the hard floor feels like little more than an afterthought. A short drumbeat over top the larger song of pain roaring through his shoulder and chest.

He gasps, lying on the floor. He can’t feel his legs, or much of anything below his ribcage. Dark motes fill his vision, like floating cinders, and there’s a terrible ringing in his ears. He’s not afraid. He just _hurts_. Some instinct tells him to concentrate on staying present, to hold off from blacking out for as long as he can, so he struggles to do that. The cinders recede to the edges of his sight, where they flicker restlessly.

_Oh_ , thinks the man, with a strange sense of calm, now that he can think again, somewhat, around the pain. The florescent lights glare down upon him, but they seem irrelevant. He can almost see straight through them. Straight through the particleboard of the ceiling, straight through the layers of cloud and smog; straight through to the bright points of the stars, the scarred coin of the full moon. _Oh, I’m dying_.

He accepts the idea with sorrow and regret, but no fear. No terror. The sky behind the ceiling is vast and welcoming. The objects he can see within the convenience store shine. Perhaps, he thinks, he has always seen only doom and dread where he might, instead, have seen potential. Well. Not his fault, probably. Too late to change now.

His mind feels larger than his leaking, leaden body, larger even than the vast, steady waves of pain. His mind feels as though it is ballooning upwards and outwards, into the open air.

He realizes that the tiny indentation between his eyebrows will never have the time to deepen into a real furrow. He realizes that he will never finish the story he’s halfway through writing; that he’ll never be recognized as a horror writer. He realizes that he will certainly, now, never see Shark Guy again, never reconcile with him, never meet another person with whom he might share a more lasting love.

Time has slowed and stretched for him, it seems. He takes as long as he needs to mourn these things, and then he lets them go. Still lying on the floor, still breathing, still bleeding in a halo of pain.

There is a young woman leaning over him. _The girl behind the counter,_ he thinks. _Did I save her? Maybe I saved her. Maybe my life was all for_ this _, for saving_ her _. Maybe she goes on to, I don’t know, cure cancer._

He doesn’t really believe that at all, of course. He wouldn’t _want_ to believe that. But he’s glad she’s alive all the same. She looks startled and wide awake and very, very young. She has a plain, ordinary face, but there’s something mesmerizing about her in this moment. She shines like all the convenience store, like all the world.

_My god_ , he thinks. _She’s beautiful._ He remembers the agonized, green-smeared face of the teenage boy who shot him, and he thinks, _He was beautiful, too._

The girl-- the young woman, really-- looks so afraid. _Do you see it?_ he wants to ask her. _Do you see what I used to see? Is the dread upon you? Don’t let it eat your heart; it isn’t the truest thing there is, not really._ His mouth won’t cooperate with him. It gapes and gasps like the mouth of a fish.

_I’m glad you’re here_ , he thinks at her, aggressively, as though it will make a difference. _I’m glad you’re with me now. Don’t worry. I’m all right. It’s not your fault._

The young woman weeps. She may not know that she is weeping. She does something with her mouth that takes him a moment to parse as smiling. She’s trying to smile for him.

_Please_ , thinks the man, _please just look. Look and really_ see _, and do not be afraid_. He makes an effort. His lips and tongue tremble.

“ ** _Look_** ,” he tells her, aloud, with great effort but surprising clarity. He knows as soon as the word escapes him that he won’t have the energy for more. That will have to suffice.

The moon and stars are bright behind the clouds and the ceiling. The man falls upwards into nothing, or everything, and still he is not afraid.

The last thing he sees is the salt-streaked face of the young woman. She nods at him. _Yes_ , she seems to be saying. _Yes, I’m looking. Yes, I will look. Yes. I see now. Yes._


End file.
